Uneasy Money

Yoram Hazony, an American-educated, Israeli philosopher and political operator, former assistant to Benjamin Netanyahu, has become a rising star of the American Right. The week before last, Hazony made his media debut at the Washington DC National Conservatism Conference inspired by his book The Virtue of Nationalism. Sponsored by the shadowy Edmund Burke Foundation, the Conference on “National Conservatism” – a title either remarkably tone-deaf, or an in-your-face provocation echoing another “national ‘ism” ideological movement – featured a keynote address by Fox New personality and provocateur par excellence Tucker Carlson, and various other right-wing notables of varying degrees of respectability, though self-avowed white nationalists were kept at a discreet distance — a distance sufficient to elicit resentful comments and nasty insinuations about Hazony’s origins and loyalties.

I had not planned to read Hazony’s book, having read enough of his articles to know Hazony’s would not be book to read for either pleasure or edification. But sometimes duty calls, so I bought Hazony’s book on Amazon at half price. I have now read the Introduction and the first three chapters. I plan to continue reading till the end, but I thought that I would write down some thoughts as I go along. So consider yourself warned, this may not be my last post about Hazony.

Hazony calls his Introduction “A Return to Nationalism;” it is not a good beginning.

Politics in Britain and America have taken a turn toward nationalism. This has been troubling to many, especially in educated circles, where global integration has long been viewed as a requirement of sound policy and moral decency. From this perspective, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the “America First” rhetoric coming out of Washington seem to herald a reversion to a more primitive stage in history, when war-mongering and racism were voiced openly and permitted to set the political agenda of nations. . . .

But nationalism was not always understood to be the evil that current public discourse suggests. . . . Progressives regarded Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as beacons of hope for mankind – and this precisely because they were considered expressions of nationalism, promising national independence and self-determination to enslaved peoples around the world. (pp. 1-2)

Ahem, Hazony cleverly – though not truthfully — appropriates Wilson, FDR and Churchill to the cause of nationalism. Although it was clever move by Hazony to try to disarm opposition to his brief for nationalism by misappropriating Wilson, FDR and Churchill to his side, it was not very smart, it being so obviously contradicted by well-known facts. Merely because Wilson, FDR, and Churchill all supported, with varying degrees of consistency and sincerity, the right of self-determination by national ethnic communities that had never, or not for a long time, enjoyed sovereign control over the territories in which they dwelled, does not mean that they did not also favor international cooperation and supra-national institutions.

For example, points 3 and 4 of Wilson’s Fourteen Points were the following:

The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.

Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.

And here is point 14:

A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike. That association of course was realized as the League of Nations, which Wilson strove mightily to create but failed to convince the United States Senate to ratify the Treaty whereby the US would have joined the League.

I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds awfully globalist .

Now what about The Atlantic Charter?

While it supported the right of self-determination of all peoples, it also called for the lowering of trade barriers and for global economic cooperation. Moreover, Churchill, far from endorsing the unqualified right of all peoples to self-determination, flatly rejected the idea that the right of self-determination extended to British India.

But besides withholding the right of self-determination from British colonial possessions and presumably those of other European powers, Churchill, in a famous speech, endorsed the idea of a United States of Europe. Now Churchill did not necessarily envision a federal union along the lines of the European Union as now constituted, but he obviously did not reject on principle the idea of some form of supra-national governance.

We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living.

So it is simply a fabrication and a misrepresentation to suggest that nationalism has ever been regarded as anything like a universal principle of political action, governance or justice. It is one of many principles, all of which have some weight, but must be balanced against, and reconciled with, other principles of justice, policy and expediency.

Going from bad to worse, Hazony continues,

Conservatives from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower likewise spoke of nationalism as a positive good. (Id.)

Where to begin? Hazony, who is not adverse to footnoting (216 altogether, almost one per page, often providing copious references to sources and scholarly literature) offers not one documentary or secondary source for this assertion. To be sure Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were Republicans. But Roosevelt differed from most Republicans of his time, gaining the Presidency only because McKinley wanted to marginalize him by choosing him as a running mate at a time when no Vice-President since Van Buren had succeeded to the Presidency, except upon the death of the incumbent President.

Eisenhower had been a non-political military figure with no party affiliation until his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination, as an alternative to the preferred conservative choice, Robert Taft. Eisenhower did not self-identify as a conservative, preferring to describe himself as a “modern Republican” to the disgust of conservatives like Barry Goldwater, whose best-selling book The Conscience of a Conservative was a sustained attack on Eisenhower’s refusal even to try to roll back the New Deal.

Moreover, when TR coined the term “New Nationalism” in a famous speech he gave in 1912, he was running for the Republican Presidential nomination against his chosen successor, William Howard Taft, by whom TR felt betrayed for trying to accommodate the conservative Republicans TR so detested. Failing to win the Republican nomination, TR ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party, splitting the Republican party, thereby ensuring the election of the progressive, though racist, Woodrow Wilson. Nor was that the end of it. Roosevelt was himself an imperialist, who had supported the War against Spain and the annexation of the Phillipines, and an early and militant proponent of US entry into World War I against Germany on the side of Britain and France. And, after the war, Roosevelt supported US entry into the League of Nations. These are not obscure historical facts, but Hazony, despite his Princeton undergraduate degree and doctorate in philosophy from Rutgers, shows no awareness of them.

Hazony seems equally unaware that, in the American context, nationalism had an entirely different meaning from its nineteenth-century European meaning, as the right of national ethnic populations, defined mainly by their common language, to form sovereign political units rather than the multi-ethnic, largely undemocratic kingdoms and empires by which they were ruled. In America, nationalism was distinguished from sectionalism, expressing the idea that the United States had become an organic unit unto itself, not merely an association of separate and distinct states. This idea, emphasized by Hamilton and the Federalists, and later the Whigs, against the states’ rights position of the Jeffersonian Democrats who resisted the claims of national and federal primacy. The classic expression of the uniquely American national sensibility was provided by Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.

Lincoln offered a conception of nationhood entirely different from that which inspired demands for the right of self-determination by European national ethnic and linguistic communities. If the notion of American exceptionalism is to have any clear meaning, it can only be in the context of Lincoln’s description of the origin and meaning of the American nationality.

After his clearly fraudulent appropriation of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower to the Nationalist Conservative cause, Hazony seizes upon Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. “In their day,’ Hazony assures us, “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were welcomed by conservatives for the ‘new nationalism’ they brought to political life.” For good measure, Hazony also adds David Ben-Gurion and Mahatma Gandhi to his nationalist pantheon, though, unaccountably, he omits any mention of their enthusiastic embrace by conservatives.

Hazony favors his readers with a single footnote at the end of this remarkable and fantastical paragraph. Forget the fact that “new nationalism” is a term peculiarly associated with Teddy Roosevelt, not with Reagan, who to my knowledge, never uttered the phrase, but the primary source cited by Hazony doesn’t even refer to Reagan in the same context as “new nationalism.” Here is the text of that footnote.

On Reagan’s “new nationalism,” see Norman Podhoretz, “The New American Majority,” Commentary (January 1981); Irving Kristol, “The Emergence of Two Republican Parties,” Reflections of a Neo-Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 111. (p. 237)

I am unable to find the Kristol text on the internet, but I did find Podhoretz’s article on the Commentary website. I will quote the entire paragraph in which the words “new nationalism” make their only appearance (it is also the only appearance of “nationalism” in the article). But before reproducing the paragraph, I will register my astonishment at the audacity of Hazony in invoking the two godfathers of neo-conservatism as validators of spurious claim made by Hazony on Reagan’s behalf to posthumous recognition as a National Conservative hero, inasmuch as Hazony goes out of his way, as we shall see presently, to cast neo-conservatism into the Gehenna of imperialistic liberalism. But first, let us consider — and marvel at — Podhoretz’s discussion of the “new nationalism.”

In my opinion, because of Chappaquiddick alone, Edward Kennedy could not have become President of the United States in 1980. Yet even if Chappaquiddick had not been a factor, Edward Kennedy would still not have been a viable candidate — not for the Democratic nomination and certainly not for the Presidency in the general election. But if this is so, why did so many Democrats (over 50 percent in some of the early polls taken before he announced) declare their support for him? Here again it is impossible to say with complete assurance. But given the way the votes were subsequently cast in 1980, I think it is a reasonable guess that in those early days many people who had never paid close attention to him took Kennedy for the same kind of political figure his brother John had been. We know from all the survey data that the political mood had been shifting for some years in a consistent direction — away from the self-doubts and self-hatreds and the neo-isolationism of the immediate post-Vietnam period and toward what some of us have called a new nationalism. In the minds of many people caught up in the new nationalist spirit, John F. Kennedy stood for a powerful America, and in expressing enthusiasm for Edward Kennedy, they were in all probability identifying him with his older brother.

This is just an astoundingly brazen misrepresentation by Hazony in hypocritically misappropriating Reagan, to whose memory most Republicans and conservatives feel some lingering sentimental attachment, even as they discard and disavow many of his most characteristic political principles.

The extent to which Hazony repudiates the neo-conservative world view that was a major pillar of the Reagan Presidency becomes clear in a long paragraph in which Hazony sets up his deeply misleading, dichotomy between the virtuous nationalism he espouses and the iniquitous liberal imperialism that he excoriates as the only two possible choices for organizing our political institutions.

This debate between nationalism and imperialism became acutely relevant again with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At that time, the struggle against Communism ended, and the minds of Western leaders became preoccupied with two great imperialist project: the European Union, which has progressively relieved member nations of many of the powers usually associated with political independence; and the project of establishing an American “world order,” in which nations that do not abide by international law will be coerced into doing so principally by means of American military might. These imperialist projects, even though their proponents do not like to call them that, for two reasons: First, their purpose is to remove decision-making from the hands of independent national governments and place it in the hands of international governments or bodies. And second, as you can immediately see from the literature produced by these individuals and institutions supporting these endeavors, they are consciously part of an imperialist political tradition, drawing their historical inspiration from the Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the British Empire. For example, Charles Krauthammer’s argument for American “Universal Dominion,” written at the dawn of the post-Cold War period, calls for American to create a “super-sovereign,” which will preside over the permanent “depreciation . . . of the notion of sovereignty” for all nations on earth. Krauthammer adopts the Latin term pax Americana to describe this vision, invoking the image of the United States as the new Rome: Just as the Roman Empire supposedly established a pax Romana . . . that obtained security and quiet for all of Europe, so America would now provide security and quiet for the entire world. (pp. 3-4)

I do not defend Krauthammer’s view of pax Americana and his support for invading Iraq in 2003. But the war in Iraq was largely instigated by a small group of right-wing ideologists with whom Krauthammer and other neo-conservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan were aligned. In the wake of September 11, 2001, they leveraged fear of another attack into a quixotic and poorly-thought-out and incompetently executed military adventure into Iraq.

That invasion was not, as Hazony falsely suggests, the inevitable result of liberal imperialism (as if liberalism and imperialism were cognate ideas). Moreover, it is deeply dishonest for Hazony to single out Krauthammer et al. for responsibility for that disaster, when Hazony’s mentor and sponsor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was a major supporter and outspoken advocate for the invasion of Iraq.

There is much more to be said about Hazony’s bad faith, but I have already said enough for one post.